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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

> socially regressive robber barons

At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.

> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]

It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

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The “Robber Barons” name is used now for the sketch comedy group on campus: https://youtube.com/@stanfordrobberbarons

And 2509 libraries.

Indeed – Carnegie Libraries may be one of the best results.

I would like to see our modern robber barons and philanthropists (and society in general) put some effort into creating a usable digital library system; we actually have things like Google Books, which scanned many university collections, but it will likely remain unusable as an actual digital library unless some sort of copyright reform can be enacted.

these thing will come, after it's too late.

robber Barons also destroyed nature and communities. only in their old age they tried to be remembered by universities and libraries.

only question is if musk and Zuckerberg will build their 2080 ouvres still in the USA or elsewhere. remember most Barrons made their fortunes living in the North East and ended up on the West. the world is more global today. the Musk University might as well end up in Shenzhen.

The current crop of tech billionaires seems fond of New Zealand and have been building bunkers there to escape from nuclear war or global warming or a peasant revolt or whatever. Maybe they'll build a university there as well?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/billionaires-are-building-lu...

>Indeed – Carnegie Libraries may be one of the best results.

how much of this "the 19th century Robber barons at least did one thing right" idea is all down to Andrew Carnegie, I sometimes wonder.

The scale of the Carnegie library program is pretty incredible. My dad’s library as a kid was a Carnegie library in central Iowa. The libraries near where I live in Dublin, Ireland are Carnegie libraries.

Same thing in my small WV hometown. Gorgeous building, too.

And polio is largely cured from this generation, and vaccines now exist that prevent diseases that once killed infants, and we have cheap and fast internet everywhere, ...

This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people of the same size, and I can't imagine how anybody who works in tech can not know of the specific good things they have done or be so confused about the bad to believe they are outweighed.

> This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people of the same size

I'd take Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, and Marie Curie over Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Benzos.

Well i meant "group" as in an actual group of people who are all doing roughly the same thing at the same time, like the previous generation of robber barons.

But even in this case, I could make a pretty strong case that Salk was less important for the eradication of Polio than Gates, and that Curie will likely be less important in the long run than Zuckerberg on healthcare and biosciences, and a weaker but reasonable case that Borlaug will be less impactful on human survivability with increasing population than Musk.

no. just NO. look at maps of polio proliferation before/after Jonas Salk, the frikkin guy who DISCOVERED/CREATED the polio vaccine, and then look at maps related to Gates work, which, while admirable, bears no comparison from the night-vs-day world of pre-polio-vaccine vs post-vaccine. Wards of people in iron-lung machines staring at mirrors on the ceiling. It was before your time, but this is no excuse for spouting total nonsense.

You might be right. It is possible that Gates is merely one of the most positively impactful human beings, rather than the absolute most positively impactful.

You can't make a case for any of that. But go ahead and try.

> This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people

By what metric?

Almost any? Counterfactual human suffering if they didn't exist, number of lives saved, GDP, mean happiness, mean of bottom 5% happiness, etc

You attribute all of that exclusively to a small group of tech ceos?

That's completely absurd, but let's see the data on that.

This is a list of proposed metrics, not things attributed

'proposed metrics'? LOL

Is that a way of saying 'I don't actually have any data or numbers backing my absurd claims'?

No, read the comment I was responding to

It doesn't contain anything that would either back or excuse your claims.

It asked for a metric and I suggested a list of metrics. It's like if I said "whales are the biggest animal" and another asked "by what metric", then I said "weight". By saying "weight", I haven't specified how heavy the animal is, I only clarified what I meant by "biggest"

It asked for specific metrics backing your claim.

Your claim was that tech billionaires contributed more towards the good of society than any other group.

You provided a list of metrics that are in no way exclusively attributable to tech billionaires, and no actual data/number on how and how much these are attributable to tech billionaires.

Your analogy is completely unrelated too.

It's more like if you said 'whales are the best animal' and then gave me a bunch of random metrics about the state of the world.

What does it mean for a metric to be "attributable" to somebody? For example, is length attributable to me? Is weight attributable to the whale?

What are you talking about?

Now you're playing games around the semantics of the word 'attributable'? Lmao

I also love how all of your analogies/examples immediately switched from amazing societal improvements to measurements of physical object characteristics. Truly amusing stuff.

Let's take one of the metrics you suggested - 'number of lives saved' - go ahead and tell me how tech billionaires have saved more lives than any other group.

Or maybe just admit that you're talking out of your ass.

I'm trying to simplify it so it's easier to understand. It's not semantics, it's a different category of thing.

Yes the billionaire I listed have saved more lives than 99.999% of humans. They do this by paying for specific individuals to be treated for specific fatal diseases, and by funding research that has led to cures and preventative vaccines that have already saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people

You don't seem to understand that your own personal feelings of love towards the 'benevolent billionaire' and their vanity projects do not in any way support your claims. Especially when you're quantifying your claims in such extreme and absurd ways.

You also don't seem to understand that if a team of scientists discovered a cure - that doesn't automatically get 100% attributed to whatever billionaire funded the building the scientists were working in at the time.

Yes I'm willing to concede that Bill Gates did not single handedly cure polio. Would you agree that he has done more good for the world than most people?

I have no way of measuring how much good Bill Gates had done for the world. He has certainly done a lot of evil as well. I literally have have no way of objectively quantifying either, and neither do you, which is why your claims cannot possibly be objectively supported by any rational means.

Ok but then would you agree that you also can't say Salk did any good for the world?

No, I wouldn't agree with that at all.

Also big difference between saying 'X did this good thing' and 'X did more good than everyone else combined'.

And the onus is on you here - you made the absurd claims - now either back them up or walk them back :)

Which robber baron do you consider to be responsible for curing polio?

Bill Gates, who contributed around 30% of the total money spent on the world eradication effort so far

So he didn't create the vaccine, and he didn't provide most of the money spent on eradication, but he did sit down for a nice long dinner with an administration that is now pulling funding from the WHO and other international health organizations.

In the meanwhile, the technocrat administration we just got is putting the anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr up as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The progress we have made on eliminating Polio is at risk directly because of actions taken by this crop of billionaires. That is more on Musk and Zuckerberg than Gates, but these people cannot be trusted to use the power and influence they have for anything other than self-enrichment.

Which do you think is more likely, that Bill Gates sat down with the administration to try to convince Trump to keep funding Gate's life work, or that Gates talked to Trump to end polio funding?

Trump bad, has nothing to do with Gates or Zuck. If you blame them for trying to prevent Trump from doing bad things, you should look into what they will benefit from and how they spend their money

> And polio is largely cured from this generation, and vaccines now exist that prevent diseases that once killed infants

Well, that depends if RFKjr and his lunatics get control of the HHS[0][1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/rfk-jr-aaron...

[1] https://www.protectourcare.org/experts-say-deadly-samoan-mea...

WHAT??? Jonas Salk GAVE the IP for the Polio Vaccine TO THE WORLD FOR FREE!

how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.

Bill Gates also gave billions of dollars to the world for free, it's just a question of which one is more praiseworthy. I could be convinced Gates was not more impactful than Salk, but he's definitely in the running for top 100 best overall human beings in terms of positive impact on the world, in stark contrast to the claim that tech billionaire have contributed nothing

Where did Bill Gates get these billions that he 'gave to the world' ?

Did he generate them purely from his genius and benevolence?

Why is "gave" in scare quotes? Did he not give the money away?

And yes, mostly genius and not benevolence.

'gave to the world' implies the world didn't have this money before gates came along. Which is obviously not true and quite literally impossible.

In fact the world didn't have this money before. Maybe this is the first time you've encountered the idea that the economy is "positive sum" so think of it like this:

Is the value of everything in the world higher or lower than it was 1000 years ago? If it's higher, how did it go up?

Maybe you need to do a quick Google on monetary policy 101 and how money is created. You seem to not understand the basics here.

While you're at it, consider what portion of MS success is directly attributable to Bill Gates and not the many thousands of other people involved in the company and code it literally copied from open source projects. Not to mention the extreme anti-competitveness of MS and their aggressiveness in suing and shutting down other companies, and other negative externalities they generated.

Ok let's compare the year 1000 with the year 1500. Do you believe the value of everything in the world increased in those 500 years? There was no monetary policy yet so that isn't the explanation

The explanation is the entire human race working diligently to produce, create and grow. Not because king Bobbert the 7th gave some artist some money, and not because king Jeffrey got rich by enslaving/conquering/exploring someone else.

> At least we got some good universities out of the 19th century iteration.

You mean the ones that turned around and produced the current market fundamentalist and elite-run culture we have today?

What a coincidence.

And the modern generation of tech industrialists? Probably not a coincidence either.

Though technically universities are more than just their endowments, business schools, engineering schools, sports teams, etc. They often have pretty good libraries, for example. Many universities also provide a variety of educational and course materials for free over the internet. Some train physicians and operate hospitals. And many universities have at least some minimal diversity of opinion on politics and policies.

The idea that elite universities produce elite university graduates is probably not controversial, and many of them were founded with the idea of producing "leaders", which they have arguably done.

> The idea that elite universities produce elite university graduates is probably not controversial…

Isn’t it?

No, it's a statement of fact, akin to "universities produce graduates".

well this

{elite universities} produce {elite university} graduates

is of course tautological

but this

elite universities produce university graduates who are elite (meaning better than others)

is debatable.

Most people who say "elite universities produce elite university graduates" mean the second and then don't provide any especially great arguments for the opinion.

The only thing elite universities provide is, possibly, “elite” connections. The education is the same, you get out of it what you put into it.

The state schools of the US aren’t worse than Stanford or Harvard, you pay extra to hang out with people who can also afford to pay extra.

The college education system in the US is second only to the healthcare system in terms of “how fucked this system truly is” metric.

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